


Artistic License

by orphan_account



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Euron Greyjoy: dead and loving it, F/M, Future Fic, Gen, Libraries, also ft. Brienne's slow evolution into Westerosi Ivanhoe, libelous depictions of fictional characters, like way way way future fic, this is entirely self-indulgent, vaguely Elizabethan setting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-05
Updated: 2019-02-02
Packaged: 2019-10-04 12:38:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,347
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17304782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Five works of historical fiction in Westeros after the War for the Dawn.





	1. Jon and Daenerys, Florian Hill

The wig is heavier than Taisha expects, soft as silk and crowned with pearl-colored braids. Most props of this nature rely heavily on the maker's imagination, but she happens to know that this one is based on an actual image of Daenerys Targaryen.

 

“What is it?” she asks, pitching her voice so that Addam, still rummaging through bundles of Meereenese court garb, can hear her. “Surely not human hair…”

 

“And why not?” Addam wants to know, popping out of the costume racks with a cheeky grin. She throws a brush at him. “Ow. Uncalled for.”

 

“It’s _not_ human hair,” Taisha insists. The wig feels suddenly alive under her fingers, like a many-legged little animal. She resists the urge to throw it across the room–Addam probably wouldn’t appreciate one of his props being abused in such a way, much less something so delicate. “Those are too expensive. We’re hardly performing for the court.”

 

“It’s the _Dragon Queen_ ,” Addam points out. “If I don’t spend money on her fancy hair, what _am_ I going to spend it on?”

 

“Wages,” Taisha says flatly. “For your actors.”

 

He pecks her on the forehead and whirls away again, surprisingly agile for a man with a peg leg. “Those, too.”

 

She rolls her eyes. “At least tell me you didn’t have someone murdered for their hair.”

 

He just laughs in response, but she’s not really worried. Addam, for all he once commanded a legion of soldiers for His Grace, is about as gentle as her mum’s old milk cow. Who knew that she’d be here, two years after climbing out the window of her family’s farmhouse wearing just the clothes on her back– _here_ , wearing fake Essosi finery and playing the part of a wicked, decadent queen?

 

She settles the wig over her carefully pinned hair and settles down to learn her lines. Florian Hill is a favored poet of the court, and it’s easy to see why when you read his verse; his words make the characters fairly leap off the page. The Crownlands’ ruling family studiously despises Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen, but Hill has taken the liberty of making them compelling, even sympathetic.

 

It’s bold, Taisha will give him that. House Lannister is not exactly known for being merciful to impertinent poets. The current king’s father used to put their heads on spikes when they’d particularly displeased him. His son is a less exacting critic of the arts, but she can well imagine that Hill had to justify this one at some length.

 

“What’s that?” Alayne asks, blustering in already dressed like Sansa Stark, her wild hair half-escaping its braid. “Oh, I like the wig.”

 

“Thanks,” Taisha says absently. She’s–well, she’s feeling _sorry_ for them, these two doomed lovers. Hill writes them _so well_. “It’s the play.”

 

“Oh,” Alayne says, looking over her shoulder. “He’s very–“ she makes a gesture with her hand that Taisha has to turn to see. “ _flowery_ , isn’t he.”

 

“It’s a romantic legend!” Taisha protests. “It’s meant to be flowery. Like _Ten Thousand Ships._ ”

 

Alayne rolls her eyes. “ _Ten Thousand Ships_ again.”

 

“ _Ten Thousand Ships_ is a _classic!_ And much better than those _novels_ where the hero is always rescuing his girl on horseback–“

 

“I’ll hear nothing against heroes on horseback,” Alayne says, haughtily and hypocritically. “That mad bitch burned King’s Landing, and you’re sighing about her romance as if she were a proper hero.”

 

 _She_ is _a hero_ , Taisha thinks. It’s different here in the Crownlands. Back home in the Reach, all the songs about Jon and Daenerys are unabashedly romantic, and she finds that she prefers those. This comes close, but Hill is still obligated to frame the couple as selfish and vicious and destructive, a necessary evil in the war against the winter and the dead. “So did Cersei Lannister.”

 

Alayne casts an uneasy glance at the door. “Yes, but you can’t _say_ that.”

 

Taisha shrugs, unsettled, and goes back to reading. Everyone knows that House Lannister has eyes and ears all over the city. She doesn’t think they’d go after some little nobody like _her_ , but.

 

Alayne is right. Best to be on the safe side.

 

“Go get ready,” she says, turning the page on the script. Sam is just about to tell Jon he’s a Targaryen, and she wants to see how he does it in this version of the legend. “We’re doing a reading.”

 

“Who died and made you director?” Alayne says, laughing, but does as she’s told. Taisha listens as she breezes through the back rooms of the theater, making as much noise on her own as three people would normally. She is, bar none, the clumsiest person that Taisha has ever met. She once bloodied her nose trying to put on a stocking.

 

She’s a very good actress, in spite of it. It’s almost annoying. Taisha focuses on her current page again, pushing all thoughts of Alayne and acting from her mind for the moment. It’s evening in King’s Landing, and she has a good story in her hands. She intends to enjoy that, whether the tale it tells is true or not.


	2. “Good Queen Sansa,” author unknown

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wars look romantic to people who didn't have to fight them.

The drunks at the next table have been singing for what feels like forever, and Ella can feel a headache coming on.

 

To be clear, it isn’t that she hates the song. “Good Queen Sansa” is a perfectly lovely piece, and she would be a terrible Stark all around if she objected to its praise of her venerable ancestor. But. _But._ Once you’ve heard it approximately ten thousand times, it begins to sound a little grating, and the fact that the current singers are slurring their words emphatically does _not_ help.

 

 _“And crownnnnnned her with silverrrrrr/Sansa our queeeeeen…._ ” The singers are flagging; one of them is already asleep. The remaining two break off, having apparently forgotten how the rest of it goes.

 

Ella sighs. When she agreed to help her uncle track down a gang of bandits, she’d expected the danger. There are always risks when it came to defending their people, and she has long since prepared herself to face the possibility of injury or death. What she _hadn’t_ prepared herself for was the boredom, and the long vigils shivering in her furs, and the crowded, stinking taverns where the smallfolk sat and drank and butchered her great-great grandmother’s name.

 

More fool her. There’s nothing especially glorious about adventures; the Starks know that better than most. Sansa Stark, who buried brothers and cousins and a boy who was both, Sansa Stark who survived the Long Night and rebuilt the North through stubbornness and sheer force of personality–she would have cuffed any child of hers who thought that war and fighting were something to be celebrated. Ella thinks about that sometimes, when she’s camping in some frost-touched meadow and can’t fall asleep. She has sisters, and two living parents, and aunts and uncles in abundance, enough to boss her around and fuss over her when she comes home from her travels. Sansa spent years and years without anyone at all.

 

It makes her want to write. Her fingers itch for a quill. She doubts she could do it justice, but there are times when she wants to try. When she turns her feet homeward, knowing that there _is_ a home waiting for her at the end of the road. When she hears her sisters giggling in their shared room in Winterfell, the Winterfell that Sansa rebuilt after the War. When she hears a song in a crowded tavern and knows, deep in her bones, that there’s more to the story than silver crowns and queens.

 

It might be a poem. It might be a book. Ella isn’t certain yet. She keeps the idea curled up in her heart like a scrap of paper, bright with promise, waiting to be revealed to the world.


	3. "Breaker of Chains" mosaic, Meereen Art Collective

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nobody quite remembers what Missandei of Naath looked like, but they remember what she did, and perhaps that's a better legacy.

There's a violent argument, in the beginning, about the color of her eyes.

 

"They're  _green_ ," Mozhdeh zo Loraq says decidedly, already fingering the tiles. 

 

"Green," Iman scoffs. She's a thin, wiry girl from the docks. Her many times great-grandmother was a slave, where Mozhdeh's was a master, and she does not like the other woman's delicate tokar, or the elegant styling of her curls. She likes still less the way she talks about their first elected leader, as if she owns the woman who freed the slaves and broke the rule of the great families. "Have you seen many Naathi with green eyes? More likely they were brown."

 

Mozhdeh knows this, but there is something so  _appealing_ about the green tile. 

 

"This will catch the eye," she argues, holding one up to the light. It glows like green leaves in her hand. "It doesn't matter what she looked like. It matters what she  _did_."

 

"She freed the slaves," Kaveh says, in deceptively mild tones. There's steel in his gaze, though, and Iman breathes out a little sigh of anger and relief. He's better at arguing than she is; he can make even the most incendiary statements sound reasonable. "I think she at least deserves to be depicted as she  _was_."

 

"Nobody knows exactly what she looked like!" Mozhdeh says, throwing up her hands. "We can take a few liberties! And this is meant to go in the new library. It should be splendid, striking. Brown eyes are everywhere. This  _green_ is rare."

 

"You're right," Kaveh says. "They  _are_ everywhere. There are a hundred thousand brown-eyed people living in the Bay. And who was Missandei of Naath, if not a woman of the people?"

 

This is a ridiculous argument. They all know it, but in the sticky heat of a Meereenese summer, queasy from their heavy midday meal and staring a deadline in the face, none of them can seem to let it go. The meeting ends when Mozhdeh makes a snide remark about  _dock girls_ and Iman throws a stylus at her face. It convenes the next morning, the three of them sulky and tired and unwilling to look the others in the eye. It's well into the day before they take out the tiles again, and this time, they decide to start on her hair, which they can, at least, agree was black.

 

They keep meeting, all through that bright, deliriously beautiful summer. The City Council wants something splendid for the new library, something symbolic of the Naathi scholar who reshaped the Bay four hundred years ago. And all three of them–Kaveh and Iman, whose ancestors learned to read in the first public school that Meereen ever had, and Mozhdeh zo Loraq, with her sharp eyes and sharper tongue, the unwieldy burden of her family name–all three of them have their own reasons for wanting to commemorate Missandei of Naath. So they bite down on their bitter words and work, and work, until finally they have a model that they can all agree on, even if it isn't quite  _perfect_.

 

A small victory, Iman thinks, watching their apprentices lay tesserae in plaster. Just a piece of art for grubby children to pick at as they wander through the library. But Missandei's eyes are dark, and her hair is curly, and her clothes are simple and unassuming. She looks like any ordinary woman on the street in Meereen, and that, in the end, is precisely the point.


	4. Oathkeeper, Cimbre Snow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Not all the North's heroes were born there.

The paper arrives just after dawn; Jeyne knows because she has been waiting by the doorway since sunrise, listening for the tread of the postman.

Winter has come to the North; white-mantled, glittering winter, sharp as a slap to the face. Jeyne's mother had tutted over the thought of the post keeping its workers on their accustomed schedule just the day before.

"It's too cold," she said. "They'll freeze the tips of their noses off,  _what_ Lady Stark was thinking - "

Lady Arya Stark, tenth of her name, was a hard-faced, wiry woman known for being equal parts just and terrifying; Jeyne imagined that she was most likely thinking that people would like to get their mail on time. But it did no good to say that when Mum was in one of her rants, so she did her sums in silence and thought longingly of what the morning would bring.

And now she has it. It crinkles under her hands, this precious paper, and she finds herself grinning and quite unable to stop. She scrambles up the stairs and makes sure to latch the door before she unfolds her prize. Serala will want to read it, but Serala is  _asleep,_ so she she can wait until Jeyne is done.

 _Oathkeeper_ 's first installment came out seven papers ago, and it has been parceled out week by week ever since. It's not a _new_ story, exactly–every child in the North knows the name of Ser Brienne–but Cimbre Snow fills her version with hair-raising escapes and daring rescues, ice demons and wicked bandits and Ser Jaime, who is very pretty and very stupid and needs frequent rescuing, usually slung over Ser Brienne's shoulder like a ham. It's all  _delicious,_ and Jeyne is possessed of a strange urge to wrap herself in the words like a blanket and disappear into them for days.

In this installment, Brienne has been taken prisoner by the Boltons and must scheme her way free. There's an amusing print under the text–Brienne looking very uncomfortable in a dress. Jeyne thinks of Mum, who has been a Ser herself for years now, and can't imagine  _her_ in a dress, either. It gives her a comfy feeling, to see ways that Mum and a hero out of legend are the same.

The doorknob rattles, and Jeyne jumps badly.

"Jeyne!" Serala wails. "Jeyne, let me in!"

"Go away!" Jeyne whispers. "I'm asleep!"

"No, you're not, I can hear you!" More rattling. "Jeyne, I know you have it, let me in!"

"I don't!"

"Do too! Let me in! I wanna read!"

In a minute, Mum and Da are going to wake up and see what all the fuss is about. They're going to make her open the door, probably with a lecture about  _sharing with your sister,_ and then Jeyne will be sentenced to  _reading it out loud_ because Serala is too little to know her letters yet. 

Until then, however, Serala's screeching is easy to ignore. Jeyne has lots of practice. She sits in her room in the pale morning sunlight, just her and the newspaper and the best story in the world.

 

 


	5. A History of the Ironborn, Maester Alwyn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What is dead may never die. Unfortunately, this proves to be rather more literal than Nasreen Dayo would like.

In the end, the Westerosi take the northern wing of the barrow, and Nasreen and her crew head south. Even the light of their three torches isn’t enough to dispel the heavy, cloaking darkness of Euron Greyjoy’s tomb. It reminds Nasreen of the stories her father likes to tell about ghouls. The Iron Islanders say far worse about this place.

 

“Stay safe, sweetheart,” Edric Hill said, when their ways diverged. He waved a hand at her, enormous ugly emerald glinting in the torchlight. “If you get bored of your riffraff, just give me a shout.”

 

Nasreen hates them. Men always do that–look at her as if she’s so very _charming_ for her love of books and archaeology, as if someone like _her_ couldn’t _possibly_ set her mind to anything more ambitious than finding a husband. It's all the same, ever since she came to Westeros–just one long line of leering, overconfident _pricks._ She’s still stewing over it when they reach the southern end of the tomb, which proves to be disappointingly empty.

 

“It’s so dry,” Yijun says. Her brother is casting an assessing look over the narrow passageway. “This close to the sea, you’d think it would be wetter.”

 

“There’s meant to be some kind of mechanism,” she says. “To suck all the moisture out of the air.”

 

“So that Euron Greyjoy doesn’t taste salt and rise from his grave?” Emyr asks sarcastically.

 

She rolls her eyes at him. “I didn’t say I _believed_ it.”

 

“Completely ridiculous,” he mutters, for all the world as if he doesn’t, either. But she knows him better, now; she can see the tension in his frame and in the careful nonchalance of his voice. “What’s your book say, princess?”

 

“Don’t call me that,” Nasreen says automatically, but she takes out _A History of the Ironborn_ all the same. She’s got the chapter marked; Maester Alwyn has the most rational explanation for the phenomenon that she’s yet found. “ _‘Yara and Theon Greyjoy captured their uncle and subjected him to the “triple death” – a ritual so secret that its details have been lost to history. They then entombed him in a hill far from the ocean. It is said, however, that should his corpse taste salt again, Euron Greyjoy will rise from his tomb and unleash his reign of terror on the world once. This, of course, is nonsense, as the entombment was meant not as a precautionary measure but as a deliberate insult to a usurper, and subsequent folklore to the contrary–‘“_

 

Someone screams. Yijun drops his torch.

 

“ _FUCK,_ ” Emyr says loudly in the sudden darkness. “Yijun!”

 

More screaming. It’s coming from back down the passageway.

 

“Nasreen,” Emyr says. For the first time since she’s known him, he sounds afraid. “ _Nasreen_?”

 

Nasreen has been clenching her fists. She unclenches them with an effort, counting back from ten the way her father taught her. “That way.”

 

They stumble down the passage in the vague direction of the shrieking Westerosi. Some part of Nasreen is shrieking, too. She’s just a _librarian_ , not a war veteran like Yijun or a seasoned adventurer like Emyr. She’s never so much as had to face down a bully in the schoolyard, much less…whatever is waiting for them down there.

 

“We’re all going to die,” she breathes, tugging her boys around another corner. “We’re all going to _die_.”

 

“Wonderful,” Emyr grits out. “Very encouraging. Thanks.”

 

The northern wing of the barrow is deserted. One of the lanterns still swings from the a crag of stone in the wall, casting its erratic light over the empty chamber and its shattered tomb. Burned-out torches are scattered across the floor, along with various bits of gear–pocketwatches, belt buckles, a–a–

 

Nasreen’s brain stutters to a halt. Yijun’s grip on her arm tightens painfully.

 

“Oh, _shit_ ,” Emyr croaks.

 

It’s a hand. It’s a hand, lying there without a body. Edric Hill’s tacky emerald ring is still attached, even if the rest of him isn’t.

 

Nasreen whirls around and is sick all over the floor.

 

“We have to get out,” Emyr says, yanking her up. Yijun is checking his weapons, cursing softly under his breath. “Come on, come on, come on–“

 

“What’s this?” someone purrs.

 

They turn. Rising out of the darkness like he was born to it, rotten teeth gleaming as he smiles, Edric Hill’s blue, blue eyes blinking at them with perfect, malicious innocence.

 

“Even _more_ of you,” Euron Greyjoy says, in a voice of salt and iron. “Don’t be afraid, girl. Come give old Euron a little kiss.”

 

“ _Run_ ,” Yijun squeaks, and they do.

 

“Yes, _run_ ,” Euron cackles. The sounds of rotten flesh slapping the stone behind them, faster and faster. “ _Run,_ children, _run!_ ”

 

Spiders swarm out from between the cracks in the flagstones and the Iron King’s laughter fills the darkness like wine overflowing a cup, and they run. They run, although of course that’s what he wants, because what else can they do?

 

Nasreen should have stayed in her archives. Nothing rose from the dead and tried to kill you in the archives.

 

“Come _on_ ,” Euron whines. He’s very close now. “You woke me up and now you have to pay the price! Just a nose! Or a heart! That’s only fair.”

 

A door slides open and daylight blinds them all. They’re yanked forward by strong hands–Nasreen lashes out blindly and catches someone on the nose–and thrown onto the grass.

__

She twists around to see a heavily-armed company of Ironborn looming over them disapprovingly. Looking back, she’ll conclude that this was the moment when the situation got _really, truly_ weird.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Was this just a Mummy AU with Euron Greyjoy as the mummy? Yes. Yes, it was.


End file.
